Is there interest in Home Tech howto’s, tutorials, and reviews?

An article by TheEvilGenius

I guess you could call me a gadget geek. I’m not the type that goes out and buys things the first day, but I do get them eventually. I started thinking about it last night when I was upgrading an older pc to use as a new media server in my home theater.

This article is an introduction and a poll to see if there is any interest in adding some different content to the blog from time to time…

Not that you asked, but below is the severity of my indulgence…

I actually used to have a few more when there was a recording studio in my garage. Alas, technology has improved and I can do all the recording I need from my study with just a keyboard, good mic, and my work pc.

All of this runs off several 100MB wired/wireless routers and switches around the house and about a mile of Cat5a. Luckily my theater room has a drop ceiling and is centrally located. That makes running the cables to everywhere a lot cleaner and I only have one visible cable that runs from the living room to my study, and one that runs from the bedroom closet to my nightstand.

The Cost?

A LOT less than you would think. All the PC’s are older ones that used to be my main work PCs that have been upgraded (Running Vista on newer ones, XP on older). Everything was installed by me. Theater was installed by me using a 1080i projector I used to use for presentations. My biggest outlay of cash was probably for the flat panels in a few rooms and Bose systems in the living room and theater. I would guesstimate that everything in the house cost less than $10-15k total, and it looks like a lot of the stuff you see in the home theater magazines.

The Benefit?

All of the systems can watch any movies from 2 TB of hard drives on the main server, listen to any music in my collection of a few thousand CD’s, view all the pictures, and even watch about 15,000 Netflix “watch instantly” movies. TV’s in the living room, study, and bedroom, and the projector in the theater are all hooked to a PC and a Tivo. I can even grab any of about a bazillion books on the server and throw it on my eBook at any time. Now that’s hardcore geek.

<–Not everyone that plays video games is a complete dork

Best yet, playing Warcraft or Metal Gear 4 on a 120″ screen in Dolby Digital completely rocks.

The reason I am sharing this with you is twofold:

Reason Number 1: Please someone – Tell me there is anybody out there that’s more of a tech freak than me - I need the rationalization.

Reason Number 2: I have a lot of hands-on experience in setting up home networks, home theaters, and PC’s/Servers for sharing everything.

Let me know if there is any interest in this type of stuff in terms of how-to’s and tutorials, reviews. etc. It gives me a break from the business stuff, and better yet, let’s me write off all the crap I buy on my taxes since it will now be part of my business - A win win!

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As always, comments/ideas/questions are encouraged.

Love,